Boy Meets World is more than a debut album; it’s a young man’s testament to the trials and tribulations of growing up.

1732 Overton Park is a strong collection of songs that masterfully displays the band’s connection with their roots by taking the best from its influences—not just sounds, but emotions alike.

The album ultimately succeeds because the band writes great, scuzzy rock and roll songs and plays the hell out of them. When you got that down, you don’t need any of the extra stuff.

It doesn’t matter if you are a die hard fan or a first time listener however, Street Hop is a great album regardless of your exposure. This album is hotter than hell in every sense of the phrase; Royce spits lava on every track, and each producer provides the napalm needed to keep the fire ablaze.

Their dusty melodies evoke images of a bygone era, one when Appalachia-bound immigrants brought over the folk tunes of their native lands and melted them into the pot that would become American folk.

Even though the new record is filled with some over-indulgent missteps, it still has an urgency and an exuberance to it that was lacking a bit on At War With The Mystics, and represents a strong return to form for a band that has now been making music together for over 26 years.

At times the sound is studio-clean and at others it sounds as if it was recorded on a home cassette player. At its worst it’s pretentious art school music. At its best it’s like stepping into someone else’s fantastically grotesque dream.

Carey may have three different hometowns listed on his MySace page but hey, two of them are American and at least for the time being, here is where his music seems rooted to stay.

With Love Comes Close, Cold Cave mixes in elements of noisy rock and dance music on an extremely strong album. The dancier portions of the album never venture into, say, Cut Copy territory, but still pack loads of melodies into an array of scuzzy arrangements.

Some will simply be happy that this supremely talented group of friends, who toured under the same moniker a few years back, are finally putting some songs to wax. Others, myself included, will take a step back from the record and come away with the feeling that the group’s self titled debut is little more than a patchwork quilt of songs that would serve no better than B-Sides for their main outfits.

And on In And Out Of Control Wagner and Foo return with a record that’s less overtly gloomy than the band’s 2007 breakout Lust Lust Lust, yet more morose and macabre than ever.

Childish Prodigy jumps all over the place over the course of its 11 songs, ranging from dreamy, strung out folk music to stomping rock and roll. The main strength of the album is the timeless sound that Vile creates, both representing new and exciting sounds while keeping an eye respectfully on the past…